Tuesday, January 31, 2006

I really like analogies. I often find them very helpful in keeping in mind important lessons or points. Today, the Sensei at the dojo where I take karate classes made what I thought was a very good analogy. We were discussing working on details in karate practice, and he said it's like weeding a garden - you have to keep at. You can't just assume that once you correctly perform a technique it will stay that way. If you don't remain mindful of the details you will stop making progress and can actually get worse over time.

This got me to thinking about how this analogy can also apply to life in general. You can choose to just live life not being mindful and it is easy for your life to become full of weeds - negative aspects that will add up and detract from what could be a much more positive life. Or, you can choose to actively work at identifying the weeds in your life and try to continuously improve. One just has to try to put in the extra effort.